Page 115 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

104 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

THE PRIVATE BROADCASTING SECTOR
The extent to which the statutes regulating the public corporations have
influenced the pluralism requirements for the emerging private sector
has depended on the local political situation. In some SPD-controlled
Länder the same pluralism principles apply to both sectors. According
to the letter of the law, a pluralist output would then also seem to be
guaranteed throughout the private sector. However, the legislation
seems difficult to implement. Instead of pluralism being an end in itself,
as it is in the public sector, these principles are the price which the private
sector has to pay in order to have a licence to make a profit by selling
airtime. But the need to spell out the requirements for elements of local
and regional diversity in nearly all the private broadcasting Acts also
indicates the significance to the private sector of concepts which have
not yet been adequately realized by the public-service corporations,
especially in radio.

Control structure
All eleven Länder have set up regulatory authorities, as autonomous
corporate bodies under public law, to license and supervise the private
broadcasters. Thus they are not government agencies and not therefore
directly open to changes of basic policy. The authorities normally have
a three-tier structure, not unlike the control structure of German public
limited companies. At the top is a pluralist supervisory board of
between eleven and fifty members (the average is around thirty) which
represents the public interest. The board licenses the private
broadcasters, monitors their programming, implements the cable
redistribution rules as laid down in the legislation and, if not specified in
the relevant Act, decides how to allocate the money which is available
for its various duties.
An executive body, which can either be internal or external to the
pluralist board, prepares and implements the board’s decisions. It
develops administrative and budgetary policies and can issue emergency
orders. The director heads the administrative office of the authority and
represents it in court. Programme monitoring, advice to broadcasters
and technical co-ordination are also his major responsibilities. The
director, who is frequently a lawyer and tends to come from the Land
administration, possesses the necessary legal and technical expertise.
His powers of decision vary from Land to Land. In Bavaria, where there
is a separate administrative board but an executive president at the top of